Chetna’s Healthy Indian – by Chetna Makan

Indian food is wonderful—a subjective opinion perhaps, but a popular view, and one this reviewer certainly shares. And of course, cooking with plenty of vegetables and spices is a great way to get a lot of health benefits.

There are usually downsides though, such as that in a lot of Indian cookbooks, every second thing is deep-fried, and what’s not deep-fried contains an entire day or more’s saturated fat content in ghee, and a lot of sides have more than their fair share of sugar.

This book fixes all that, by offering 80 recipes that prioritize health without sacrificing flavor.

The recipes are, as the title suggests, vegetarian, though many are not vegan (yogurt and cheese featuring in many recipes). That said, even if you are vegan, it’s pretty easy to veganize those with the obvious plant-based substitutions. If you have soy yogurt and can whip up vegan paneer yourself (here’s our own recipe for that), you’re pretty much sorted.

The cookbook strikes a good balance of being neither complicated nor “did we really need a recipe for this?” basic, and delivers value in all of its recipes. The ingredients, often a worry for many Westerners, should be easily found if you have a well-stocked supermarket near you; there’s nothing obscure here.

Bottom line: if you’d like to cook more Indian food and want your food to be exciting without also making your blood pressure exciting, then this is an excellent book for keeping you well-nourished, body and soul.

Click here to check out Chetna’s Healthy Indian, and spice up your culinary repertoire!